Doctrinal And Non-Doctrinal Methods Of Research: A Comparative Analysis

Doctrinal And Non-Doctrinal Methods Of Research: A Comparative Analysis Of Both Within The Field Of Legal Research

Urmi Roy, LL.M (I.P.) (Intellectual Property Laws), Amity Law School, Noida, Amity University, Uttar Pradesh

ABSTRACT

The term research can be defined as conducting of repeated researches on something with the objective of finding out new things or any specific knowledge in relation to certain existing facts. In general parlance legal research circumscribes within its ambit formulation of a systematic study for which implementation of a specific methodology is required. As law is considered to be an integral part of the social process and primely aims towards organizing of the society in a systematic manner by retaining the state of tranquility and order, so it becomes essential to induce altered tools or approaches in coping with different situations arising within the same. Legal research can be basically divided into two broad categories involving: the doctrinal legal research or normative and non-doctrinal legal research or Empirical. The doctrinal legal research mainly deals with analysis or study of the legal principles, rules and doctrines currently existing within the society, whereas on the other the non-doctrinal research emphasizes on the aspect of assessing or establishing of the relationship of law with that of other behavioral sciences including society, people and other social institutions. However, in the recent years it has been witnessed that the purview of legal research has remained more confined to implementation of doctrinal methodology and less emphasis have been placed upon noon doctrinal research methods. This paper mainly focuses on analyzing the relevance and usefulness of both doctrinal and non-doctrinal research methods within the field of legal research and also further inducing a comparative analysis between both the methods.

Keywords: Research, Library Based research, Doctrinal research, non- doctrinal research, traditional research, empirical studies.